Sam Dalrymple on lost borders, hidden letters and South Asia's five partitions

India Today

5 days ago

What if our history books only told half the story? For Sam Dalrymple, that question became the spark for Shattered Lands: Five Partitions in the Making of a Modern South Asia. Speaking to India Today TV's Gaurav Sawant on Booked, Dalrymple unpacked the Raj's forgotten geography — one that once stretched 'all the way as far as Aden in what's now southern Yemen.'advertisementThe conversation began with a moment that shifted his research. While working on Partition testimonies in Tripura, Dalrymple asked a local man how 1947 had affected his hometown. The reply stopped him short: 'Which partition?' Was it 1937, when Burma split? Was it 1947, or 1971?From there, Dalrymple began tracing not just the 1947 India–Pakistan divide, but five partitions — from Burma's April Fool's Day separation to Bangladesh's birth in 1971 — that together birthed 12 nations. And in doing so, he uncovered stories few Indians have heard.BURMA'S BREAKAWAY AND THE FIRST 'PAKISTAN'
Burma, Dalrymple explained, was India's richest province for over a century. But rising tensions over jobs and rent in the 1920s and '30s led to growing calls to leave the Raj. The newspapers of the time, he said, felt 'oddly reminiscent of British debates about Brexit.' On April 1, 1937, Burma officially split from India — the first province to successfully argue it had a separate identity.Within weeks, Cambridge student Rahmat Ali Chaudhry coined the term 'Pakistan', explicitly arguing that if Burma could separate, so could Muslim-majority provinces in India. It was a political seed that would grow into Partition a decade later.GOA, PARANOIA, AND THE START OF PROXY WARSBy the 1950s, India and Pakistan were unexpectedly cordial, even sharing intelligence to stop communist revolutions. That changed with India's liberation of Goa in 1961. Pakistan's military ruler Ayub Khan, Dalrymple said, became convinced India had 'a new expansionist mindset' — and that Pakistan would be next.Within months, Pakistan began funding insurgencies in India's northeast. India retaliated by backing separatists in Pakistan's Pashtun and Bengali regions. The long-running proxy war, Dalrymple noted, began here — a fact revealed only in recently declassified files examined by scholar Avinash Paliwal.NEHRU, EDWINA, AND JINNAH'S SUSPICIONSThe book also revisits the much-discussed relationship between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten. 'They were close enough to make Jinnah so suspicious that he refused to let Mountbatten stay on as Governor General of Pakistan,' Dalrymple said.Within days of the Mountbattens' arrival in India, senior officials were noting the closeness between Edwina and Nehru in private diaries. While many accounts came from political rivals, Dalrymple said one fact remains clear — their friendship influenced high-stakes decisions during Partition's chaotic first months. SARDAR PATEL'S UNSEEN GRIP ON INTELLIGENCEOne of the most startling revelations in Shattered Lands is the power Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel wielded in the final months before independence. By August 1946, Patel, as Home Minister-in-waiting, controlled the Intelligence Bureau and decided what information Lord Mountbatten could see.Mountbatten, Dalrymple said, suspected Patel 'knew things he's not telling him.' Newly unearthed research suggests Patel's behind-the-scenes influence was far greater than the public record shows.KASHMIR, CONTESTED TIMELINES, AND EARLY MILITARY DEFIANCEThe Kashmir accession controversy — whether Indian troops landed before the Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession — remains a point of dispute. What's less known is how early Pakistan's military began acting without Jinnah's approval.Dalrymple revealed that in September 1947, within weeks of independence, Pakistani officers plotted to stir unrest in Kashmir and send in troops — a move kept from Jinnah for almost three months.British officers, too, played a role. In Gilgit, a British major famously 'got drunk — a couple of bottles of gin' before arresting the Maharaja's officer and raising the Pakistani flag.advertisement1971: SOUTH ASIA'S CUBAN MISSILE CRISISDalrymple calls the final partition — Bangladesh's 1971 liberation — a Cold War drama to rival the Cuban Missile Crisis. As the US sent its nuclear fleet to the Bay of Bengal to back Pakistan, the USSR responded with nuclear submarines in support of India.Amid this, Indian General Jacob pressed Pakistani commander AAK Niazi for a full surrender before US reinforcements could arrive. The meeting, immortalised in a photograph, came complete with 'chicken legs and bananas' on the table.FORGOTTEN MAPS, LASTING IMPACTFrom Yemen to Myanmar, Dalrymple's book restores stories the subcontinent has largely erased from memory. Whether it's a Yemeni Jewish woman forced to travel on an Indian passport or the near-absorption of Dubai into India, Shattered Lands is packed with moments that redraw our mental maps.As he told Sawant, 'The scale of the Raj is something that we've forgotten.' His work is a reminder that the borders we take for granted are neither fixed nor inevitable — and that the decisions made in smoky rooms decades ago still shape today's headlines.- Ends